The Beviad–musings, mutterings and myths

It reminds me of once seeing a lark, in England, appropriately enough. We were in our twenties, and staying in Somerset at a bed and breakfast near Glastonbury. We went for a walk, hoping to have a picnic somewhere rural. We went down a dirt road, then across a field. There were cows around, and cow droppings on the ground. We spent as much time watching the ground as looking around at the surrounding hills and trees and farmhouses. And then, we heard it: a lark. We both looked up in surprise, thrilled, and stepped promptly into a large, moist cow-pie.

This is just one reason why my theory about life is summed up in the phrase, “Never Mozart without static.” It’s a phrase that comes originally from “Steppenwolf” by Hesse. Mozart himself teaches the protagonist that life is filled with beauty, but it seldom is unmitigated beauty. There’s usually some distraction, some touch of something annoying or negative, which you must try to ignore in order to see and appreciate the beauty.

Years later, John and I were in Greece for a month with Pasley, who was a year and a half. We were lucky enough to be in a villa overlooking the sea, with a patio rimmed with roses. We were young, good looking and able to stay at such a place only by sheer chance, for little money–$300 for the month, which included laundry services. At night, we sat on our patio and drank oozo or retsina with newly acquired friends, or went to an outdoor terrasse overlooking the sea to eat and drink, with Pasley trotting about in little shoes I had made out of denim, visiting the other diners and collecting from them their worry beads. During the day, we hiked through pine forests to clean, virgin beaches with white sand and turquoise water where Pasley could swim naked. It was a paradise. And yet…

We spent most of the time worrying about whether or not the landlord was going to charge us more for the villa than we had agreed to; we couldn’t speak Greek and he couldn’t speak English, so we couldn’t ask. His wife obviously thought we were too young to enjoy such a lovely villa, and made a point of banging around in the hall behind or villa doing the laundry every other day around 6. We were eaten alive by mosquitoes each night, despite a smudge pot at the door. And we could hear  people partying down at the beach, along with awful, tiny music, all night long, until finally, silence, and then, at about 4 am every morning, the sound of scooters coming along the little road below us: vendors heading for town with produce to sell. They sounded like overgrown hornets and always woke us. We were, as a result, both itchy and sleep-deprived during the entire vacation.

In other words, Mozart with static.

The same was the case when Pasley and I rented a cottage in the hills above Dartmoor. It was hundreds of years old and quaint. It was in a tiny village with an ancient well in its center, and one night the  wild ponies of Dartmoor came in to drink at the well, and we fed them carrots in the fog. There was a pub nearby. And yet…

We had no means of transportation, since I hadn’t realized that ‘good for touring’ meant ‘in your own car’: I had thought that meant by tour bus. We had to  walk about 5 miles down and back up to where we could get a bus to go anywher, or even buy groceries—through wonderful, mountainous scenery, but on  a very wearying way. The cottage, for all its quaintitude, was fixed so that you couldn’t get hot water, electricity or the badly needed heat from a gas fireplace if you didn’t have a slew of coins to put in the proper meters, coins which initially we didn’t have and always seemed to be running out of. The pub was poorly lit, had no charm, and the people in it were unfriendly. The moor ponies were filthy with their own dung, so that you couldn’t stand near them. Walking so far every day just to get a bus,  plus then walking wherever we went to, I managed to get ‘plantar’s fasciitis’, a  sprain of the muscles across the sole of my feet, so that by the time we hit London, I could hardly walk, which meant that we didn’t go around the Tower of London as we would have liked.

I managed to make things somewhat better by getting us out of there to go to the tip of Cornwall overnight, to eat seafood at a restaurant once frequented by smugglers. But on the whole, it was Mozart with static the whole way.

The thing is, I’ve found, you have to anticipate a certain amount of something negative in any experience, and try to overcome it rather than sitting around complaining or getting depressed. This takes a great deal of effort, which means that you are never really allowed to relax, but it does mean that you will rememberr the experience fondly. The ’static’ actually makes the remembrance of it all much more bitter sweet, because instead of relaxing, you were trying so hard to focus on the pleasant aspects that you really ingrained them into your memory.

I have to remember this every day, for it’s not just on vacation that you find such things. 

 One thing very noticeable about the series is the difference between Roman culture and ours today. For one thing, we see almost no embarrassment or repression about sexuality. Marc Antony can be shown in bed, telling his womenfolk that he’s not getting up until he fucks someone, and the women, instead of being shocked or offended or disapproving,  tut-tut over him as if he were just a petulant child demanding breakfast in bed. Yet one of the ‘womenfolk’ is Atia of the Julii, Antony’s mistress as well as Octavian’s mother. Atia finally says, casually, to one of the slaves, “Oh, all right, fetch that slut from the kitchens”, which does suggest that for women, at least, there was the concept of ’slut’– a suggestion of women, at least, being looked down on if they are too interested in sex. On the other hand, Atia herself is quite openly brazen in her sexuality. 

In the same way, a whole troop of Roman soldiers is shown waiting on the road to Rome, showing impatience, nothing more, while Antony ‘fucks’–there’s no other term appropriate, really–a peasant girl against a tree, a girl he apparently spied from horseback as they passed her by. Their reaction is much like that of someone today on a trip who keeps  having to wait while one of their number keeps making pitstops to get coffee. On the whole, there is no suggestion that sexual desires are something one must repress or be ashamed of, not if the person doing these things is a man, anyway. Some of the upper class Romans in the city are a bit testy about Antony’s coarseness; there is a scene, for example, of Cicero wincing as Antony pisses into a potted plant right next to him during a meeting in Antony’s house. Antony is obviously considered a bit much even by his fellow Romans, and is shown to be increasingly debauched as the series continues. But there’s not much difference shown for someone like Pullo, one of the main protagonists, who is sympathetically shown but just as focused on sexual opportunities. He’s just more kind and funny about it, and is shown as capable of real  tenderness towards the slave Eirenye.

The other thing we notice about Roman culture in this series is the almost complete absence of anything like compassion or mercy. Men and women, while watching Pullo fighting for his life in an arena at the hands of professional gladiators, cheer as enthusiastically as today’s audiences  at a football game. When Pullo’s friend Varenus finally intercedes and rescues his friend, it is only because  they are war buddies, and because their previous legion is being verbally insulted by one of the gladiators. Later, Varenus shows pity for his children when rescuing them from a slave camp, but that is familial feeling. He might not feel that way about other children in danger.

As well, according to this series, all manner of torture and murder seem to have been quite normal in the city. Of course, one can’t go by what Atia does in terms of this: she seems quite heartless and montrous, avidly watching the torture she has ordered poor Timon, the Jew, to carry out in front of her. Little old ladies do cry out ‘murder!’ when they see someone being slain in the street in front of them, but that seems to be out of a sense of shock at the impunity of such an occurance; there seems to be little general compassion for someone who is killed or  hurt, but is not a family member. When Servila of the Junii has been tortured then released, she appears on the street with a face  covered with blood, stumbling and almost falling, yet no one tries to help her. Are they afraid of interfering, or just indifferent? Today, people would stop immediately and call the cops or an ambulance. 

The general ethos of Romans seems to be one where family members’ pain counts, but the pain of others is treated as only a titilation at most, or something to step aside from at the least. It’s  enough to make one feel that Christianity, with all its faults, was worth it if only to bring in a general public abhorence of cruelty— not right away, since I have read that the deaths in the Forum still went on after Christianity became the official Roman religion, but eventually. 

There was so much violence around, even in the upper classes, that one wonders how anyone could sleep at night in the Roman world. Cicero is shown being quite two-faced much of the time when talking to both the assassins of Caesar and the anti-assassins, but who can blame him? He is threatened, quite politely, by the wretched Antony, while they have a drink together. And yet he still dares to send an insulting letter to Antony to be read in the Senate. This is more courageous than anything shown by most of the elite Romans in the series. Even with Pullo and Varenus, our ‘heroes’, since they are rugged army types, violence is just a short jab with a sword away in almost any scene. It’s understandable when our heroes are running the criminal element in Rome’s Aventine area, but it also appears on a family level.

Was llife really so cheap in those days? Or are we just looking at soldiers’ morals? Are there presumably some noble, honorable people somewhere that we don’t see? Honor is spoken of by Varenus. He mentions it when stating that killing his wife’s bastard son would be what  honor demands. He also gets into a horrendously angry state when he learns his wife was unfaithful while he was gone and presumably dead; he almost kills her and her son, stopped only by her suicide and his daughters’ running up to rescue the little boy. It is also apparently an aspect of ‘honor’ to do what you said you’d do. A lot of it seems tied up to men’s sexual pride and not much more.

The view of Roman religion is also interesting here. Pullo is forever offering prayers and sacrifices (even of a bug, when he’s in jail) to one god or another in order to obtain help.  Some of the series’ humor lies in his bargaining with the gods, promising a spotless lamb if they help him, or if he can’t get a good price on a lamb, then a pigeon. Servilia of the Junii is shown praying to some goddess even as she is ‘bagged’ and carted off to be tortured by Atia. When Varenus and his wife  go to claim the land Caesar has given them, they bring a priest, and re-enact some sort of ritual that involves pretending to have sex, there in the muddy field. Then they put a thumb print of soil on each other’s foreheads. 

Varenus later, after losing wife and children, claims he is the son of ‘Dis’, who appears to be Satan, even though Pullo warns that the gods don’t like such talk. A discussion with the chief thugs of the Aventine, in which Varenus declares that he will be in charge of crime from now on, is made more frightening to the hardened criminals he faces when he smashes the statue of  Lady Concord, the goddess whose statue’s presence has sworn them all to omit all violence from this meeting. It seems that this viscious act of impiety and irrevenence is enough to make the men agree to let Varenus be chief. We kept wondering if the same would be true today of Mafiosa in the presence of a statue of the Virgin Mary. Would they be equally awed and intimidated if her statue was smashed? In other words, what would Tony Soprano  do in such a situation?

All in all, it is a great and highly addictive series. I haven’t finished it, but I’ve already ordered the DVDs from Amazon. I want to have them for myself, to see again. The extras included on the DVDs are informative. For one thing, I learned that in setting up this movie set, the set-designers looked at very old existing cities like Bombay in order to reproduce the look of a place that is very old, yet full of life, with an interesting contrast between beautiful public buildings and the poorer streets and buildings. I also learned that it was filmed in the real city of Rome and its surrounding countryside, which I guess helps explain the wonderful golden light that every scene is bathed in.

I’d like to die upon an Autumn day,

In my own bedroom in my own, big bed,

Watching, out the window,  how each leaf

Turns from deep green to red, 

Or green to yellow,

While a concerto with a deep, low cello,

Fills all the room with song too sweet for grief.

With, near at hand, hot scones, sweet jam, hot tea,

With at least three pillows at my back.

And, gently tucked around my weary body,

A handmade quilt, soft, worn. And with my black

And white cat, Oreo, in my lap, in full purr,

Warm, as I stroke his glossy fur.

I wouldn’t like folk hovering by the bed.

Just coming, now and then, to say hello,

To rearrange the pillows at my head,

Or sit awhile and chat. And then to go

Down to make up a brand new pot of tea

In the kitchen that was mine not long ago.

No heaven, I think, could ever be as good

As what our senses give us. And to me,

That’s all I need or want. And all I should

Expect. And really, now, how could there be?

This world is all there is. Here let me feel

The music, color, touch and love that’s real. 

After looking online for tours, I have decided that for myself, the idea of traipsing (or, in my case, possibly limping–depending on how my leg is next year at this time) around many churches and museums in a large crowd is not very appealing. Besides, I feel as if I have seen Italian Renaissance art in movies and on television in art series. Do I really need to see it in person? Well, I don’t really mean ‘need’; what I mean is, would I feel anything more in seeing the art face to face, so to speak, than I do  already? Or would it be–I hate to say this– rather boring?

On the other hand, it’s hard for me to imagine being able to walk around with any comfort, while looking at art, whether it’s paintings or murals. These days, I have a hard time going around our local museum/art gallery. I usually try to sit down whenever I get a chance. So, I also have to think of that, too.

I have found online a company called Go Ahead Tours which has a ‘tour’ called ‘A Taste of Tuscany and Umbria.’ It  sounds just about my speed. It is a ten day tour that stays in the north of Italy, focussing on Florence, Siena and various small, medieval towns. And it includes 2 wine tastings and a Tuscan cooking class. It is rated ‘comfortable’ in a range going from ‘Leisurely’ to ‘Active’. 

There are times when I’d be walking around, in the medieval towns, for example, but it’s  not a fast-paced tour. In Florence, for example, where one spends 3 days, there is lots of free time to wander around and see art, churches, etc. But we’d be on our own on at least one day and could set our own pace then. And the touring- on-foot parts are short in length, interspersed with the wine tastings and the cooking class. 

We’d have to move from hotel to hotel, of course (four hotels in all, ending with Rome), which John wouldn’t like, but I wouldn’t mind; there’d be a chance for a good night’s sleep in there in one or two of those beds, I hope. And in the ten days, one would get, included in the price, 9 breakfasts, 4 dinners, and one large lunch, which would reduce the overall cost.  The travel is by air-conditioned bus on land. And the airfare is included, which isn’t always the case for these tours; tours with other companies cost about the same yet include only the land travel in Italy. 

The cost, if we go in June, July or August next summer, would be $3,274 each,  or $150  less for each if we book before August 31 of this year. I figure we could put the cost on a credit card, then each put in about $150 a month until it’s paid off. That way, it’d be somewhat paid by the time we took the trip.

Of course, we could stay home and use the $6, 248 to do the kitchen cupboards, which really need doing,  and would be there to look at after next summer. Yet the memories of a good trip last a long time, too. We’re still remembering fondly the trip we made circumnavigating England in 1990, where John drove and we stayed at English country B&Bs that I had chosen on the basis that they were in over 200 year old buildings. That trip has stayed with us longer than the cabinets we put into the cupboard from Ikea, which are now peeling and looking pretty ratty. Plus, it would be more fun to go on the trip, all things working out, of course: no sickness or sleeplessness from bad beds, for example. And this time we would be staying at hotels, not B&Bs, which are the ones that might have lumpy mattresses. And the food would probably be great. 

John, of course, hates flying, and on any of the trips to Europe I have planned (Enland and Paris in 1969, Greek islands in 1972, England in 1990) has had to be dragged to the airport, often almost drunk  (he feels he can face flying only that way). He points out that we could just stay home and take Italian cooking courses (or I could, at least), while going out to Italian restaurants more often. I have to convince him that it would be more fun to go to Italy and do these things.

The only problem is, I have images of many movies such as the one called something like “If It’s Tuesday This Must Be Rome”, with bored, rude Americans stumbling around looking at art in a group, only half aware of where they are because of the fast moving nature of their tour, and  worn out from such traveling. Obviously, I wouldn’t want to be in such a group. I’d rather like the “Room With a View” type of Italian experience, if such a thing is possible. 

I thought it might have been caused by too much coffee, so I didn’t have any the next day, but when I checked the side effects online, I found that in fact my medication must have caused these sensations, including the racing heart or arrhythmia. I decided to stop taking Dilaudid, but one can’t just stop: withdrawal symptoms will occur. Instead, I started taking Tylenol with Codeine, which is also an opiate, I think. After two days without any of those previous symptoms, I’m quite relieved.

As for my knee, its scar is fading and flattening out so that it doesn’t look as much like a zipper any more. It’s persistent scab disappeared about two weeks ago. And it doesn’t hurt much any more, at least, not while I take medication, although it’s still very stiff in the mornings. I can almost say that it’s better than it was before the operation.